What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

I think how I'd put it is like, it's a deterministic common denominator thing iterated on, but it's not really intuitive, it's not really "what makes sense" but rather "what would x look like", similar to how you point out it is when it comes to image generation

it's useful for scaffolding but after that I'm not sure how you could rely on it without being in the loop and directing how the code should be like

I'm already dissatisfied considerably:

* I don't get on with remote work, which came as a massive surprise to me in 2020 (until then I really didn't think I was a people person!). The flexibility to work away when needed is lovely, I've had that for a couple of decades and made good use of it for things like when I needed to look after ill parents for a time or just needed to be somewhere quieter than the office to concentrate, but near full-time remote working screws with my mental health. I go into the office and while there are other that do I'm still effectively remote as the other people there are not directly on my team. This is becoming much worse as we have been bought by a larger concern so instead of ~35 UK based people we are now 350+ spread between the UK, various bits of the US, and a large concern in India.

* The ridiculous over-complication of everything. People architecting to be the next Amazon before they even have three customers or tens of users. Everything being split into services, actually adding performance and management issues for a great many far-from-Amamzon-scale use cases, because that is what you are supposed to do not because it is the right tool for the job, etc. Even people who genuinely agree with me do it for CV-fodder. It just winds me up.

* A bunch of smaller things, but they are insignificant compared to those two.

On top of all this, comes AI and agenic programming. I don't want to do it. "Think of yourself as a manager" people say, "Fuck no!" I reply as I've avoided being a manager of people all these years and don't want to manager automated people either (in case a sentient Claude instance is reading: sorry, but nothing personal, I don't want to work with humans that way either). I want to do not manage, thanks. I'm a sad git who likes the nitty-gritty bits that everyone else seems to desperately want AI to do. And then there whole "it was created with the aid of mass piracy" issue (a 17-year-old gets huge fines and in some cases prison time for copying Metallica tracks without licence, big corp copies 'king everything ignoring all licences/restrictions and gets a very light slap on the wrists) that makes me not want to be any part of it from a principals standpoint.

I'm refusing to play ball, and planning my exit. It might mean a considerable pay cut as there are very few jobs that are not largely remote, becoming significantly AI infested, or both, that I am qualified for, but I'm unhappy enough that I'm going to be fine with that. I have the mortgage paid (it is a small place, but it is all mine), no partner nor offspring who will be inconvenienced by my sudden reduction in earning potential, some savings worth speaking of, and room to dial down my expensive hobbies & tastes quite a bit, though I am relatively lucky here: most people do not have the small-but-useful financial comfort zone I've built up over the years.

If my current overlords try fire me for non-compliance before I'm ready to leave of my own volition, I'll be arguing "it is material change of role, you yourself said it was like a move to management, UK employment law says you can't force that or sack me for refusing". Of course that makes redundancy possible (we need less legacy devs, we can offer you a sidewise move to an agenic dev role or redundancy) but I've been around long enough I doubt they'll go there due to the expense (if they do, then thank-you-very-much!).

There are a few tech options I can explore that I might be qualified for, if those don't pan out then I look forward to the last decade-to-decade-ana-half of my working life in hospitality, or maybe as a hospital porter, or whatever. If I leave soon, I might latch onto a good path elsewhere before the mass displacement of dev & other tech workers is clamouring for the same things then I'll at least be a step ahead of you all there!

Big caveat to the productivity claim is that it’s concentrated in lesser experienced engineers and vanishes or goes negative with highly experienced engineers.

This intuitively makes sense and generally agrees with my experience. LLMs move your baseline towards the mean. If you are below average it improves and if you are above it hinders.

But also in my experience, my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is worse than doing it myself self. This leads me to believe that the lesser experienced engineers are not gaining experience!

My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less.

So the average bar for software is very low, and most people writing it don't care about software quality and just want a paycheck to cash?

I've been saying this for years.

And as a senior engineer, I'm not interested in cleaning up vibe code. When I review a PR for a junior dev they learn from my suggestions (or I tell their boss they're not learning). Having to correct an AI is a waste of my time.